{"id":12072,"date":"2017-03-01T20:01:26","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T04:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dminlgp.com\/?p=12072"},"modified":"2017-03-01T20:01:26","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T04:01:26","slug":"wow-dude-what-happened","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wow-dude-what-happened\/","title":{"rendered":"Wow Dude! What Happened?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0In my teenage years, I was never really one of the \u201cin\u201d crowd or a part of the \u201ccool\u201d counterculture. I wasn’t anti-social. I had friends; we hung out. It\u2019s just that I preferred to be outside fishing in a stream over sitting on the ground somewhere in protest. Not only that, there was no way my dad was going to let me grow my hair over my ears. It just wasn\u2019t going to happen! Let\u2019s not even mention the beads. Yes, I took some heat<\/em> for that, but hey man<\/em>, that\u2019s life!<\/p>\n

At the time it seemed that the people who tried hardest to be unique and a part of the counterculture actually became cookie cutter images of each other. Contrary to popular culture, the Bohemian lifestyle was not invented in the USA; it\u2019s been around since circa 1620\u2014nothing new there! So the \u201ccool\u201d counterculture of the 60s, came shouting into the 70s, then came disco-dancing into the 80s; they purchased their way into the 90s and now find themselves wondering: Wow dude!\u00a0What happened?<\/p>\n

Enter Heath\u2019s and Potter\u2019s thesis. Those of the counterculture movement striving to overthrow the capitalistic system, viewing themselves as righteous outlaws fighting against a class system that had at its heart money and control, ironically became the greatest generation of capitalists of all time. According to the authors, the counterculture has invaded the business world. Their ideas and ideology have become that which drives the consumer culture. \u201cRather than abolishing class, cool has essentially replaced class as the central determinant of social prestige.\u201d[1] The counterculture has become the consumer culture.[2]<\/p>\n

Heath and Potter take their thesis one step future. Not only has the counterculture become the consumer culture, the movement has at best hindered the progress of social justice in our world, at worst has had no part in any social gain. Most of the social gains in our world have not taken place because of a counterculture movement but by the hard work of people who work within the system. The gains happened through \u201cdemocratic political action\u2014through people making arguments, conducting studies, assembling coalitions and legislating change.\u201d[3]<\/p>\n

Their general conclusion: We now realize that the great rebellion, the counterculture movement, the striving to throw out the system, really hasn\u2019t changed anything; in fact, it may have made things worse. Their answer: \u201cWe might start by clearing away some of the consumerist clutter and introducing a bit more uniformity into our lives. Instead of \u2018daring to be different\u2019, perhaps we should dare to be the same.\u201d[4]<\/p>\n

Application<\/strong><\/p>\n

Though Heath and Potter consider themselves to be progressive in their political views, their thesis and conclusions seem rather conservative in nature. For example, they use strong words concerning law and order and espouse the importance of working within the system. \u201cBeing an outlaw is in many ways parasitic upon the existence of an organized society. What if everyone became an outlaw? What does a society with no institutions, no rules, and no regulations look like?[5] Maybe the seem like more conservative views because the progressive and conservative views have become so dichotomized that it\u2019s more difficult to find common ground among the two. Is the area located in the overlapping vectors of the Venn diagram empty when it comes to progressive and conservative views? Have we come to a point where there is no middle ground.<\/p>\n

In the last several books that we have read for this semester including Weber, Polani, Cavanaugh and Miller, one can sense a desperation to understand what is taking place in our world and a desire to make it somehow better. However, decade after decade we seem to find ourselves in the very same place. Heath and Potter say it this way: \u201cDecades of countercultural rebellion have failed to change anything because the theory of society on which the countercultural idea rests is false.\u201d[6] For the authors, part of the answer is to work within the greater organized and structured governments to make changes for the good. But again, we are back where we started.<\/p>\n

The question becomes for me, who then is responsible for a better world? Should Christian worry about a temporal world and its systems or should they focus only on the eternal? As a Christian, we should be concerned about both. That is part of our reason for existence. However, concern and fulfillment are two\u00a0different things.<\/p>\n

I would assert that the counterculture movement was assimilated into the greater capitalist culture in part because\u00a0of the desire to fulfill the deeper needs of the soul with substitutes that cannot fulfill\u2014namely things, power, and prestige. The inner longing, the deep desire, the calling of the heart is a gift that leads us to the Creator. If our fulfillment comes from a relationship with the Creator, then we may be in a better position to affect change in our world.<\/p>\n

The difficulty with this assertion like this is that cannot be proved imperially and so it is debatable, academically. And yet, I somehow know it is true. Furthermore, \u00a0I am not the only one who somehow knows it is true. The \u201cknowing\u201d supersedes political, economic and cultural lines. Could it be that the \u201cfaithful\u201d are to be the counterculture? I think so. If you\u2019re interested, I recommend The Upside-Down Kingdom<\/em> by Donald Kraybill.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. The Rebel Sell: How the Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture<\/i>. Capstone, 2006, 205.<\/li>\n
  2. Ibid., 108.<\/li>\n
  3. Ibid., 11.<\/li>\n
  4. Ibid., 189.<\/li>\n
  5. Ibid., 58.<\/li>\n
  6. Ibid., 10.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    \u00a0In my teenage years, I was never really one of the \u201cin\u201d crowd or a part of the \u201ccool\u201d counterculture. I wasn’t anti-social. I had friends; we hung out. It\u2019s just that I preferred to be outside fishing in a stream over sitting on the ground somewhere in protest. Not only that, there was no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[847],"class_list":["post-12072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-heath-and-potter","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}